Whether sleek or jagged, classic film noirs boast a sharp-edged ferocity and despair, as if the world—and the lives of its tiny inhabitants—were perched on the edge of a lethal blade. Severe shadows, sumptuous fog, hardboiled banter, and a grim cynicism about the possibility of changing anything in this godforsaken place (including one’s own fortunes) are its calling cards, contributing to a mood of despondent fatalism that cuts so deep it leaves a bloody mark. At their best, they’re bruised, scraped and scarred sagas about the enduring desire to be something else and the impossibility of ever achieving that dream, cast in terms as no-nonsense and rugged as their doomed protagonists.
Which is to say, they’re not over-the-top all-star Hollywood spectaculars that wear their enormous budgets on their ornate sleeves, precisely because such a constitution is at odds with their inherent nature as tales of small-timers (or big men who are really chumps) striving to improve and/or escape their inadequate predicaments. But don’t tell that to Guillermo del Toro, whose follow-up to 2017’s Oscar-winning The Shape of Water is Nightmare Alley (Dec. 17, in theaters), a re-do of Edmund Goulding’s underseen 1947 film of the same name (based on the novel by William Lindsay Gresham). Populated by a who’s who of Hollywood luminaries led by Bradley Cooper and Cate Blanchett, del Toro’s latest wants to be the Gone with the Wind of noirs, scaled to epic size and opulent to the point of distraction. That modus operandi, however, is precisely what undercuts its power; aside from a few striking sequences, especially in its latter half, it’s an uneven modernized throwback that proves at once excessively lavish and slavishly faithful to its source material.
Co-written by Kim Morgan, Nightmare Alley follows its predecessor’s narrative to a tee, save for some additions that—along with del Toro’s more luxuriant direction, which likes to linger on tableaus of actors posturing amidst exaggerated sets—distends the proceedings, especially in its early going. Stanton Carlisle (Cooper) is a 1930s drifter who’s introduced dragging a body into a hole in the floor of a run-down farmhouse as if he were an ape. That’s deliberate, given that this is a tragedy about man’s beastliness, which becomes clearer once Stanton arrives at a carnival of lost souls and is immediately fascinated by proprietor Clem’s (Willem Dafoe) biggest freak-show draw: the geek, an exploited boozehound and drug addict who bites the heads off of chickens for the entertainment of patrons. There may be no actual monsters in del Toro’s film, only wretched men, but as a devoted horror maven, the auteur still makes sure to linger on the geek’s gruesome feeding, just as he’ll later fixate on a victim’s mauled face.
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Stanton is a shady figure with a coldly calculating eye, and he eventually secures a job at the carnival and worms his way into the orbit of two mentalists, sexy Zeena (Toni Collette) and drunkard Pete (David Strathairn), all while falling for innocent Molly (Rooney Mara), who earns a living wowing customers by literally electrifying herself on a nightly basis. Once Stanton steals Pete’s secrets for a can’t-miss mind-reading routine, sparks begin to fly between him and Molly. By 1941, they’ve left the circus to hit it big in the posh city, where Stanton humiliates, and then partners with, cunning psychologist Dr. Lilith Ritter (Blanchett), whose knack for reading people is almost as great as Stanton’s, and whose glistening platinum-blonde ‘do would make Barbara Stanwyck green with envy. Together, they hatch a scheme to swindle rich suckers out of their cash—including a judge’s wife (Mary Steenburgen) and a menacing tycoon (Richard Jenkins)—by pretending to communicate with dead loved ones. It’s not long before calamity befalls everyone, in the process validating Pete’s early warning that, once a trickster begins believing that his tricks are real, death follows.
Nightmare Alley’s initial passages drag, reveling in creepy carnival-attraction sights of skulls, demons, eyeballs, funhouse mirrors and spiraling designs (as well as some rain-drenched incidents, per del Toro’s perpetual fondness for sogginess) that come across like the director’s attempt at late Tim Burton aesthetics. The pace—and heat—is turned up considerably once Stanton relocates to the urban jungle and more fully embraces his inner predator. At that point, Cooper’s performance comes alive, although the self-annihilating ambition that should be driving Stanton never quite materializes; the character’s assured, arrogant poise is maintained for so long that his descent comes on too abruptly. Even so, Cooper’s work in the final scene is a terrific culmination of Stanton’s plummet from grace, and far outpaces most of the rest of the cast, who are either relegated to playing blandly colorful types (Colette, Dafoe, Jenkins, Ron Perlman as a protective strongman), milquetoast blanks (Mara), or—in the case of Blanchett—a femme fatale caricature so deliberately broad and mannered that she does little more than strike menacingly seductive poses and flash frigid smiles and glares at her would-be partner in crime.
Film noirs (and their neo-noir progeny) are, to varying degrees, defined by their idiosyncratic affectations. Yet like another hyper-stylized noir follow-up to a Best Picture triumph, Sam Mendes’ Road to Perdition, Nightmare Alley’s affectations are of a second-generation sort, which—as with shots that linger on Stanton standing in darkness at the carnival, or Lilith leaning back on her office couch—render the affair a blockbuster-budgeted pantomime. Morgan and del Toro’ script trots out alcoholism issues, fire motifs and three competing visions of femininity in Molly (virginal), Zeena (lascivious) and Lilith (rapacious), as well as saddles Stanton with copious mommy and daddy hang-ups. Unfortunately, they’re just a jumble of unimportant secondary themes that are competing for attention at the expense of the story’s dour, Icarus-esque rise-and-fall core. From his lushly realized locations and elaborate camerawork to his overstuffed plot and baroque score (courtesy of Nathan Johnson), del Toro strives for grandness at every opportunity, and the effect is to drown out the action’s true darkness in look-at-me showiness.
While del Toro’s affection for noir is clear, his sensibilities turn out to be an unnatural fit for the genre; he’s too much of a gooey monster-movie geek and romantic softie to capture its brutal bleakness. Despite a few moments of inspired grandeur, Nightmare Alley is an ornamental tribute more than the real deal, and the fact that it thinks it’s the latter ultimately goes a long way toward kneecapping its potency.
